The immeasurable Merle Haggard

Click to see a gallery of Merle Haggard over the years (photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images for The Smith Center)

He’s a singer, a songwriter and a survivor.

He’s had 77 albums and 41 chart-topping songs.

But it’s another number that brings him pride these days.

Merle Haggard, the much-vaunted “poet of the common man” and the fellow many folks figure to be the finest singer-songwriter in the history of country music, paused to think about his most recent triumph.

“I’m proud,” he said. “Proud to be above ground and in good health. I had a rough start this year, but I’m in good health now, and everything’s back on schedule.”

In January, Haggard was hospitalized for pneumonia and had to cancel a string of concerts. In 2008, he fought and beat lung cancer. Frightening episodes each, even for a man who’s hard to scare. But, as he arrives in Nashville this week for a Wednesday Ryman Auditorium show (sold out, as is always the case for him in Music City), he’s feeling vital, creative and thankful.

His musical heroes — chief among them Jimmie Rodgers, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams and Bob Wills — all died before they could turn 75. Wills died at 70, Frizzell at 47, Rodgers at 35 and Williams at a booze-addled 29. And while historian and Country Music Hall of Fame Museum editor Michael Gray points (correctly, in my view) to Haggard and Williams as country’s two most-influential songwriters, Haggard’s catalog includes hundreds of songs that convey an accumulated wisdom of the sort that the brilliant, heart-scorching Williams didn’t live long enough to possess.

Haggard’s dear friend and fellow Hall of Famer Kris Kristofferson doesn’t hesitate to place Haggard not only as country’s greatest writer but also as “the greatest artist in American history.” Art has no scoreboard, though, and Haggard’s most valuable asset is a resounding singularity that keeps him from being in competition with anyone. He is, above all, unique.

“I can’t believe his life hasn’t been given the Hollywood treatment,” Gray says. But even a quasi-factual cinematic re-telling of the Haggard story would require an extraordinary suspension of disbelief from audiences.

A movie with scenes depicting a California childhood spent in a converted boxcar? Scenes about a teenager who is sent to San Quentin state prison for a botched burglary and who is moved to reform his ways not by the guards or the chaplain but by a Johnny Cash concert on the penitentiary grounds? Scenes depicting a man freed from prison in 1960 who within 10 years would become the biggest star in country music? No, that could never happen.

But it did happen, and, more and more these days, Haggard smiles to think about it all.

“That first decade, after I got out of San Quentin, that would be hard to believe if you documented all that,” he said. “Once I got out, I really never looked back, and I didn’t stumble. I was able to keep my life straight, and I worked my butt off, but I never had so much fun in all my life. I got to play with great, great musicians, and we made a whole lot of music.”

“Whole lot” is a gross understatement. Haggard got out in 1960 and was recording singles in 1962. His first album on Capitol Records, Strangers, came out in 1965, and in 1969, he had six major country hits.

In the first nine years of his album-making career, Haggard leaned heavily on original material and recorded 30 albums.

Compare that to modern country kingpins’ (and queenpins’) careers: Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley, Kenny Chesney and Rascal Flatts recorded seven albums apiece in their first nine years. George Strait released 11 in that time, but didn’t write any of the material. (He sure sang it pretty, though.) Taylor Swift, lauded as a prolific writer, has released three studio albums and one live set in her career’s first five years. She can catch up with Haggard’s 30 by releasing 26 full-length albums over the next five years, which is 5.2 albums a year. So, an album every three months won’t do the trick.

Haggard’s productivity was not at the expense of quality control, by the way.

In those first nine years, he recorded now-classics “The Bottle Let Me Down,” “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” “Swinging Doors,” “Mama Tried,” “Silver Wings,” “Workin’ Man Blues,” “If We Make it Through December,” “Branded Man,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” “Okie From Muskogee” and many more.

He likens his songwriting during that time to a faucet that he couldn’t turn off. It also helped that he and his musicians have always preferred soul, groove and inspiration over mechanized refinement in the studio, allowing Haggard to record quickly and effectively in very little time.

“On the That’s the Way Love Goes album (released in 1983), I remember we had a day where we started at 10 in the morning and walked out at 1 p.m., and by the time we left we’d recorded five classics,” Haggard said. “The song “That’s the Way Love Goes” won a Grammy for best male performance. We never overdubbed anything. That son of a bitch was perfect.”

On paper, that statement sounds like bragging, yet Haggard notes that song’s perfection not with swagger but with wonder. He’s as amazed as any of us at the way all of this has turned out.

In the early 1970s, he found himself amazed to have become the political right wing’s scruffiest darling, as many conservatives cheered his criticisms of youthful war protesters in “Okie From Muskogee” and “Fightin’ Side of Me.” The lyrics of those songs seemed in opposition to songs from his friend Johnny Cash, who sang in support of the youth culture in “What is Truth?”

But Haggard and Cash were lifelong buddies, and today Haggard says their shared devotion to freedom of speech was much more consequential than any momentary differences of political opinion.

In Deke Dickerson’s liner notes to the Bear Family boxed set Hag, Haggard details the changes in his opinions and says of the youth protesters, “I believe history has proven them right.” Haggard’s barely-post-“Okie” musing, “Somewhere in Between,” was written in 1970 but not released by Capitol Records:

“I stand looking at the left wing, and I turn towards the right,” he sang. “And neither side don’t look too good examined under light / That’s just freedom of opinion, and the legal right to choose / And that’s one right I hope we never lose.”

Haggard chose to devote himself to writing and recording 25 lifetimes’ worth of enduring songs, and to travel around singing them for us. As the 1970s moved into the 1980s, his voice got deeper and richer, taking on a character not unlike good whiskey, and he offered up gems like “Kern River,” “Big City,” “Going Where the Lonely Go” and, of course, the gently devastating take on Lefty Frizzell’s “That’s the Way Love Goes.”

The 1990s found him in record company flux but still writing wondrous material and singing outstanding works from others’ pens, such as Iris DeMent’s “No Time to Cry.”

And in the new century, in spite of his health battles, he’s recorded a much-loved, chart-topping bluegrass album, a duets album with George Jones and highly regarded solo efforts like If I Could Only Fly, Chicago Wind, I Am What I Am and the most recent, Working in Tennessee.

He’ll arrive in Nashville for the Ryman show with a catalog that includes 77 albums and 41 chart-topping songs.

“There’s more than 100 songs of mine that have been in the country Top 100, and 63 that have been in the top three,” he said, with some measure of amazement. “I’ve been blessed in so many ways, and all I can do is thank the Lord, and thank the folks for supporting me.”

Merle Haggard has been so many things: a singer, a songwriter, a renegade, a survivor, a working man and a branded man and a poet of the common man.

He knows how it feels to be shackled with handcuffs, and he knows the weight of a lifetime achievement medallion affixed to a ribbon placed around his neck by the president of the United States.

He’s been fallible, miserable, down-hearted, dangerous and uplifting. And now he’s 75, alive and picking.

If he hadn’t made it this far, if the cancer or the pneumonia had gotten to him and this was an obit rather than an appreciation, I’d be trying to sum the whole thing up in the past tense. I’d think back on things he’s told me, and probably take his words for my own.

And, knowing full well of his indiscretions, his difficulties and trespasses, I’d write the truth: “That son of a bitch was perfect.”

Merle Haggard’s Wednesday show at Ryman Auditorium is sold out, but on that afternoon , some of his close friends will be at the Country Music Hall of Fame to discuss the Bakersfield music community that spawned Haggard, and to speak about their decades of work with Haggard.